EurOCEAN 2000 - Vlaams Instituut voor de Zee

ARAMIS,
A NEW SYSTEM FOR ROBOTIC INSPECTION OF SEDIMENTS,
HAS SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED THE FIRST TEST CAMPAIGN
632
A. Terribile 1 , D. Lane 2 , G. Veruggio 3 , V. Rigaud 4 , B. Papalia 5 ,
W. Simpson 6 , M. Canals 7 , C. Smith 8 , A. Grehan 9
1 Tecnomare SpA, Italy; 2 Heriot-Watt University, UK; 3 IFREMER, France; 4 CNR-IAN, Italy;
5 ENEA, Italy; 6 Challenger Oceanic, UK; 7 Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; 8 Institute of
Marine Biology of Crete, Greece; 9 National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
SUMMARY
There is an increasing demand by the scientific community for a mobile scientific platform
capable of automatically obtaining samples of, for example, water and sediment, and of
carrying out accurate quantitative photo and video transects. To address both the needs of state
of the art scientific investigations and to improve the efficiency and economy of data
collection, an innovative system, ARAMIS (Advanced ROV package for Automatic Mobile
Investigation of Sediments), has been developed with the support of EC MAST III program.
ARAMIS is a scientific and technological package, to be integrated with typical mid class
existing ROV’s. The ARAMIS+ROV system is aimed at providing a highly automated
scientific tool for carrying carry out multidisciplinary missions. Such capabilities have been
demonstrated by a first test campaign of the system, carried out in protected waters.
INTRODUCTION
There is an increasing demand by the scientific community for a mobile scientific platform
capable of automatically obtaining samples of, for example, water and sediment, and of
carrying out accurate quantitative photo and video transects. In particular, the possibility of
actually inferring accurate and real-time dimensional information from TV pictures with the
capability for absolute size measurements is deemed extremely valuable.
Up to the present day the majority of marine measurements (chemical, biological and physical)
is taken by remote sampling techniques, i.e. by deploying the sampling devices directly from
the surface. These techniques have inherent problems, such as: they are inefficient, sampling
cannot be precision related to an underwater feature, is not repeatable, and can have a high
degree of impact on the environment.
The employment of Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV's) potentially alleviates such
drawbacks. Indeed, the scientific community has been using ROV's for the past 20 years, but
these have been mostly with ‘off-the-shelf’ models and very few have been adapted for
specialized sampling.
To both address the needs of state of the art scientific investigations and to improve the
efficiency and economy of data collection, an innovative system, ARAMIS (Advanced ROV